Customer needs management

[Pages:14]Customer needs management

White Paper

Leveraging requirements management to deliver products that customers will buy

By enabling product developers to capture product requirements and tie these requirements to decision making across every stage in the product lifecycle, Teamcenter? software facilitates a wide variety of business initiatives, including lean design, quality improvement, product test and integration, material management, regulatory compliance, design verification and strategic sourcing.

Issued by: Siemens PLM Software. ? 2010. Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Software Inc. All rights reserved.

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Contents

Executive summary .............................................................................3 Managing requirements to meet customer needs..............................3 The role of requirements management.............................................3

Business issues ....................................................................................5 Value of connected requirements ........................................................6 Combining systems engineering with requirements management ......8 Capturing and decomposing your requirements ..................................9

Leveraging captured requirements under Teamcenter .....................10 Leveraging requirements for process improvement...........................11 Bottom-line benefits ..........................................................................13

Issued by: Siemens PLM Software. ? 2010. Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Software Inc. All rights reserved.

White Paper | Customer needs management

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Executive summary

In today's highly dispersed global economy, meeting the needs of your customers is not easy. You may have to deliver products to global markets defined by ever-changing market demands, customer profiles, regulatory guidelines and consumer preferences. You may develop your products in an extended enterprise that spans multiple geographic, organizational and technological borders. You may need to adjust your product designs in mid-stream to account for new technology, changing regulations or rising market opportunities.

In a world like this, virtually every product maker faces the prospect of runaway costs, schedule delays, marketplace failures, embarrassing snafus and avoidable rework in every product development program.

With this in mind, the role of requirements management has become more essential than ever before in determining the success of product development. Independent studies have repeatedly shown that no development process will result in a successful product offering unless the products you deliver are rigorously aligned with up-to-date and accurate marketplace requirements and customer expectations.

Managing requirements to meet customer needs

Almost all of today's product makers need an effective solution for enabling their products to meet customer needs. Requirements management facilitates this business objective by providing the following basic benefits.

Cross-discipline communications Most companies implement their product development programs in enterprises that cross multiple disciplines, organizational boundaries and geographical borders. Product requirements provide these diverse participants with a common language they can employ to determine what customers want. Equally important, requirements enable developers and other lifecycle participants to determine how to address trade-off issues (such as cost, quality, schedule, performance and regulatory constraints) that typically arise during product development.

End-point definition Product requirements enable developers to determine "when they've arrived" at an optimal product design, manufacturing solution or serviceable product. In essence, requirements provide developers with a quantifiable means of determining what is "too much" or "too little" in terms of product content. Product requirements let developers establish "end points" for each stage in the product lifecycle.

Quality definitions According to internationally known quality experts like Philip Crosby, "quality" is defined as conformance to requirements. This gives rise to a simple and compelling question ? how will you know if you have a quality product, if you don't understand your customers' requirements?

The role of requirements management

Teamcenter addresses your company's need to define, manage and leverage product requirements on a repeatable and rigorous basis by providing unsurpassed requirements management capabilities. Teamcenter links captured requirements directly into the product development cycle. As a result, Teamcenter enables global product development teams to fully understand how product requirements evolve across the product lifecycle and the impact that these changes will have on product design, as well as the impact that design changes will have on the product's requirements.

Teamcenter facilitates customer needs management by meeting three key imperatives.

? Teamcenter enables your company to understand what its target market and customer base want in terms of documented expectations, preferences, standards and regulations and allows your enterprise to capture this information from multiple sources as product requirements.

? Teamcenter allows you to link these requirements to fine-grain design elements that you can trace across the product configurations and definitions that describe a product's various lifecycle states.

Issued by: Siemens PLM Software. ? 2010. Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Software Inc. All rights reserved.

White Paper | Customer needs management

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? Teamcenter supports cross-discipline closed loop feedback by recognizing when your program constraints are in danger of being violated, when changes to your product requirements and design elements occur and what impact design change has on product requirements ? as well as the impact of changed requirements on product design.

These basic Teamcenter capabilities enable requirements to flow throughout your product development process and function as a basis for decision-support that directly influences:

? Machine tool design and factory layout decisions

? Man-machine interface/ergonomic decisions

? Upgrade planning and product family management decisions

? Validation decisions (e.g., initiated by alarms triggered during CAE analysis)

? Schedule/resource decisions (e.g., by assessing impacts associated with proposed design/requirement changes)

? Configuration change decisions (e.g., by evaluating changes made against actual product models)

To optimize this decision-making, you can implement Teamcenter to support a variety of business initiatives including:

Lean design, where development teams are able to eliminate over-design by fully understanding what customers want for a price they are willing to pay and implementing end points for every stage in the product lifecycle.

Quality initiatives (such as Design for Six Sigma, ISO and QFD-driven programs), where the early definition of quality measures enables product developers to design-out defects and improve quality.

Product test/integration and design validation, where product developers link individual requirements directly into their test and integration processes so that test execution is able to verify product compliance.

Regulatory compliance and material management, where developers capture an array of regulatory requirements (such as environmental regulations, extended producer responsibility legislation and endof-life vehicle directives, as well as security, fiscal and financial and medical considerations) as the basis for analyzing products at the material, substance, part, assembly and rolled up BOM levels.

Strategic sourcing, where procurement teams inject component requirements and their related design definitions into automated bid processes, thereby enabling prospective suppliers to fully understand development needs and decision makers to effectively assess potential suppliers in terms of design capabilities, quality and cost considerations.

New product development and introduction, where companies focus on increasing the revenue potential of right-to-market products while validating new ideas against market opportunities. This focus facilitates product and service innovations that enable new products to hit the ground running ahead of their competitors, thereby improving the likelihood that customers will buy these products.

Product family management, which enables enterprises to establish product platforms with connected requirements that can be managed, re-used and optimized across whole families of similar product offerings. Product makers typically adopt these initiatives when they want to maximize their revenue by rapidly delivering product enhancements, derivatives, niche offerings and add-ons.

Global product development, where companies leverage global teaming to gain 24 x7 product development efficiencies.

Issued by: Siemens PLM Software. ? 2010. Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Software Inc. All rights reserved.

White Paper | Customer needs management

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Business issues

Many enterprises use a variety of methods to create and maintain marketplace and customer requirements, including spreadsheets, custom-built databases and document-oriented tracing tools. These approaches typically result in isolated requirements being retained across multiple computers, in diverse documents that nobody reads, behind user interfaces that require a lengthy learning curve or in databases that do not reflect a product-related context.

In the early 1990s, Texas Instruments conducted a landmark study that quantified this problem and its impact on business efficiency. The study found that the failure to capture, understand and keep up with project requirements results in runaway development costs 70 percent of the time. More specifically, seven in 10 projects that failed to keep their requirements up to date resulted in programs that were either over budget, behind schedule or unable to accurately define their end-point.

Symptoms of runaway development projects

Late cycle engineering change notices

Need for heroic integration efforts

Dubious quality (requirements misaligned with customer/market expectations)

Highly expensive documentation

Texas Instruments also discovered that even projects that employ some form of document management, database management or tracing tool have high runaway rates. In essence, this result showed that capturing requirements is not sufficient ? by itself ? to ensure project success.

S S

S S

S S

Cum 100%

System lifecycle

costs

Acquisition and operation 5% Development 10% Validation 15%

Concept 70%

Actual funds spent

(cum percent)

1

2

3

4

12

Years and phases of system evolution

Phases in the product lifecycle contrasted with actual funding spent.

Texas Instruments concluded that requirements isolated from the product development cycle cannot effectively influence product design. What you need instead is a connected requirements environment that directly links product requirements to the digital environment that developers use to design and validate your products.

As the seminal Texas Instrument study indicates, maintaining up-to-date product requirements is one thing; having them influence product design is another. Siemens PLM Software's requirements management capabilities derive their power from Teamcenter and its ability to connect product requirements into the product development cycle. This connection enables an enterprise's continually updated requirements to influence design decisions while development actually is happening.

Approach to requirements

Projects that ignore requirements

Projects that capture requirements in document form

Projects that capture requirements in a database

Projects that capture requirements with a tracing tool

Runaway probability 7 out of 10 5 out of 10

4 out of 10

4 out of 10

Issued by: Siemens PLM Software. ? 2010. Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Software Inc. All rights reserved.

White Paper | Customer needs management

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Value of connected requirements

Connected requirements deliver an impressive array of benefits, including:

? Increased marketplace success. In today's highly competitive global economy, product makers cannot expect their products to financially succeed unless they comply with the requirements, regulations, standards, expectations and preferences of their target markets. To ensure that products are aligned with today's marketplace demands, product developers ? and everyone else who participates in the product lifecycle ? need to tangibly understand how their decisions will impact a wide array of product requirements. Teamcenter enables developers to trace the impact of product decisions to fine-grain design items.

Equally important, when requirements are captured and tracked in a Teamcenter-managed PLM environment (which supports a robust set of knowledge management, process management and collaboration capabilities), developers are able to leverage everyday tools that they already understand to assess the impact of their iterative product decisions. As a result, product developers are able to repeatedly consider alternative design solutions with an eye to optimally satisfying a mix of customer/marketplace demands and cost/scheduling program constraints.

? Reduced development cost, which occurs when enterprises are able to optimize the early stages of the product development where the cost of your lifecycle is most dramatically affected. For years, consulting companies have used the accompanying chart to explain the relationship between cost containment and cost realization. As the diagram on page 6 illustrates, nearly 90 percent of the cost of a project is fixed by the time a product reaches the development stage in its lifecycle. In essence, as valuable as your downstream cost efficiencies may be, they can only influence about 10 percent of your lifecycle cost. In contrast, the early stages of product development ? where requirements are defined ? provide you with the opportunity to realize your most significant cost savings potential.

Teamcenter enables developers and downstream participants in your product lifecycle to understand your product requirements as early in the lifecycle as possible. The earlier these teams understand your requirements, the less rework they will have to perform. This savings is especially important when rework has to be performed late in the product lifecycle (e.g., after your manufacturing tools and production facilities have been built and need to be changed to accommodate unforeseen requirements).

? Accelerated time-to-market. In today's global economy, product makers need to implement agile product development processes capable of repeatedly and systematically accommodating ever-evolving product requirements. Changing consumer preferences, new technological advances and rising business opportunities require product developers to keep up to date with the competition. Teamcenter provides developers with real-time feedback they can use to quickly understand changing requirements and their impact on product design.

Teamcenter also enables developers to assess the fine-grain impact of changing requirements on specific parts and components ? as well as the product definitions that support and sustain these design items. Teamcenter can be implemented so that developers are notified when design items and their related program constraints are at risk.

? Shorter test and integration cycles. Test and integration cycles often take up as much as 50 to 60 percent of a product's overall lifecycle. Teamcenter enables you to link requirements with your test cases and verify that product content meets your customer and market requirements. You can use Teamcenter to monitor and report on test results and establish complete traceability and audit trails for each requirement.

Issued by: Siemens PLM Software. ? 2010. Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Software Inc. All rights reserved.

White Paper | Customer needs management

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Teamcenter can automatically generate test documents and specifications to describe conducted tests and their results. It also enables you to enforce a test methodology where tests are rerun automatically to verify that a re-designed product still is compliant. By allowing you to build requirements-related compliance into product test and integration, Teamcenter minimizes both the cost and cycle time required to perform this crucial process.

? Optimum product quality. Many companies invest millions of dollars implementing Six Sigma quality initiatives only to discover that they have hit the 4-Sigma quality wall. This shortfall is largely attributable to the fact that quality initiatives cannot reach their full potential simply by improving downstream stages in the product lifecycle (e.g., manufacturing-oriented processes). Teamcenter lets enterprises incorporate Six Sigma quality goals into early lifecycle stages, thereby designing-in quality and designing-out defects. Industry analysts estimate that a 2-Sigma improvement reduces the cost of quality by as much as 25 percent of product sales.

Issued by: Siemens PLM Software. ? 2010. Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Software Inc. All rights reserved.

White Paper | Customer needs management

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Combining systems engineering with requirements management

Referring back to Texas Instruments' landmark study, the study's authors were surprised to discover many runaway projects where developers had implemented extensive design specifications and trace matrices, but ended up designing to the wrong set of requirements. The study concluded that the only way to ensure that you have the right set of requirements is to map your requirements to the problem that you are trying to solve. Given that issue, it becomes extremely important to answer the following fundamental question:

How do you arrive at the correct set of requirements?

Siemens PLM Software believes systems engineering is the answer to this question.

Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary approach to product realization that enables you to understand each of your products as a whole ? and better architect the processes you use to plan, develop, manufacture and sustain your products.

Companies leverage systems engineering to model/analyze the interactions between a product's requirements, subsystems, constraints and components and optimize the tradeoffs that drive crucial decisions across the entire product lifecycle. System architects can use models, such as TRIZ, as a means of identifying alternative ways of accomplishing objective criteria and then designing these criteria as requirements that comprise the overall systems definition.

Development teams can implement a variety of Siemens PLM Software capabilities to gain the whole product understanding that is essential to systems engineering.

? Teamcenter's Systems Architect enables you to implement a systematic and repeatable approach to systems engineering in the planning stage of your product lifecycle. Systems Architect enables you to understand each product that you develop in its totality, including its high-level strategic roles ? as well as the requirements, regulatory compliance and program constraints that the product is expected to meet.

? Teamcenter's requirements management solution allows you to define each of your product development programs in terms of its captured requirements and then link these requirements to fine-grain design items. In addition, Teamcenter can manage, update and audit these linked requirements throughout every stage in the product lifecycle.

? NXTM WAVE for System Based Modeling uses managed top-down control structures to logically develop and manage inter-part geometric dependencies that allow developers to understand how changing values buried deep within the part and assembly structure affect the final product model.

? NX Knowledge Fusion drives product designs "up front" by enabling developers to leverage external requirements and knowledge databases, as well as to embed knowledge rules inside existing designs for the purpose of encapsulating stimuli/results sequences.

? NX simulation, validation and optimization tools enable product developers to: 1) validate design alternatives against defined requirements during the early stages of concept design, 2) validate the design model against multiple CAE requirements during product test and validation and 3) check the design for compliance against corporate standards and processes.

? Teamcenter's environmental compliance solution allows product developers to validate product compliance with multiple environmental regulations ? such as European Union directives on Restriction on the use of Hazardous Substance (RoHS) and Waste from Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), extended producer responsibility (EPR) legislation and end-of-life vehicle (ELV) requirements.

This white paper describes Teamcenter's ability to facilitate product development through the use of requirements capture and communication. Other white papers address Siemens PLM Software's overall approach to systems engineering, NX solutions and Teamcenter's environmental compliance solution.

Issued by: Siemens PLM Software. ? 2010. Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Software Inc. All rights reserved.

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